He died penniless and blamed for some of the worst massacres perpetrated against the English language. But more than 100 years later, William Topaz McGonagall, otherwise known as the world’s worst poet, will achieve respectability of a sort when 35 of his original poems go for auction in Edinburgh on May 16.

The sale is an extraordinary turnaround for a man who, as the people of his native Dundee still observe, was “so giftedly bad he backed unwittingly into genius”.

The poems, which will be sold as one lot and include 15 originals not held by the National Library of Scotland, have been given a guide price of £4,500-£6,500, similar to a collection of Harry Potter first editions signed by J.K. Rowling and considerably more than rare early editions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, which are also being auctioned.

For the “Tayside Tragedian”, whose public readings were so appalling that they had audiences hysterical with laughter and even provoked riots, it is a far cry from the ridicule heaped on him during his lifetime.

The works, which are being sold by an unnamed private collector, have all the hallmarks of McGonagall at his best – complete with the usual banalities and dreadful rhymes.

Dating from 1882 to 1899, only three years before his death, they include an ode to Robert Burns, a poem about the Battle of Waterloo and another about a fire at a theatre in Aberdeen.

They include his tribute to Glasgow, which begins: “Beautiful city of Glasgow, with your streets so neat and clean/Your stately mansions, and beautiful Green!/Likewise your beautiful bridges across the river Clyde/And on your bonnie banks I would like to reside”.

Women’s Suffrage adds McGonagall’s tuppence to the debate about extending the vote to women: “Fellow men! why should the lords try to despise/And prohibit women from having the benefit of the parliamentary Franchise?/When they pay the same taxes as you and me/I consider they ought to have the same liberty.”

McGonagall, the son of an Irish cotton weaver, began writing poety only at the age of 47 and never, he felt, achieved the recognition that he deserved during a career that encompassed more than 200 poems and an autobiography (inscribed “Dedicated to Himself, knowing none greater”).

His audience howled with laughter whenever he performed his poems on stage, pelting him with eggs and vegetables. On one occasion he walked 60 miles from Dundee to Balmoral in the hope of seeing Queen Victoria, only to be turned away at the gates.

In 1891 students at the University of Glasgow wrote their own McGonagall-esque tribute: “Among the poets of the present day/There is no one on earth who can be possible for to gainsay/But that William McGonagall, poet and tragedian/Is truely the greatest poet that was ever found above or below the meridian.”

However, the authors of the McGonagall Online archive, one of a growing number of websites set up to celebrate the poet, do not believe the students did the great man justice: “True, this pallid parody has preserved McGonagall’s banality, the tortuous rhyme and flagrant disregard for metre, but it lacks that quintessential something, the indefinable quality that transforms the bad into the execrable.”

But for a man who never seemed to doubt his own genius, the auction is probably nothing less than he would have expected. “If anything, I think he would probably be surprised at how long it’s taken for people to come round to him,” Alex Dove, a specialist at the auctioneer Lyon and Turnbull, said yesterday.

McGonagall’s originals . . .

’Twas in the year of 1896, and on the 30th of September,
Which many people in Aberdeen will long remember;
The burning of the People’s Variety Theatre, in Bridge Place,
Because the fire spread like lightning at a rapid pace.

The Burning of the People’s Variety Theatre, Aberdeen

’Tis beautiful to see the ships passing to and fro,
Laden with goods for the high and the low,
So let the beautiful city of Glasgow flourish,
And may the inhabitants always find food their bodies to nourish.

Glasgow

Alas! I am very sorry to say,
That ninety lives have been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

The Tay Bridge Disaster

. . . blessed by Barnes

Much derided poet who wrote beside the silv’ry Tay,
Rejoice! For I am very glad to say
That your poems have not been taken away.
No! They have been gathered together in a manner so fine
They are sure to be remembered for a very long time.
They will be sold for a fortune in Edinburgh city,
Every song, every ode and every last ditty.
They are offered by the auction house Turnbull and Lyon,
A concern every connoisseur tries to keep an eye on.
People said they were the worst poems ever to be found,
But they are likely to make about six thousand pounds.
Bless William McGonagall, favourite of the muses!
His time comes at last, if not the time that he chooses.
For it seems that the world has at last understood
That as a poet he was remarkably good.
A century of sneering at last brings the day That reveals the true value of the bard of the silv’ry Tay.

Simon Barnes

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